Morocco. What does that word conjure for you ? 

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Thronging souks, merchants in hooded gelabas selling colourful wares, bright, glinting glass lanterns set in hand-cut brass? Pointy-toed slippers?  

 

It's only 101 years since the publicationof  the first modern guide book to the Kingdom in North Africa. Penned by the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, Edith Wharton, In Morocco remains a classic of the genre, and reading it today,  her decscriptions are as fresh and searingly precise as when she motored through the bled with her French hosts in 1917.

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" Morocco is too curious, too beautiful, too rich in landscape and architecture, and above all too much of a novelty, not to attract one of the main streams of spring travel as soon as Mediterranean passenger traffic is resumed. Now that the war is over, only a few months' work on roads and railways divide it from the great torrent of "tourism"; and once that deluge is let loose, no eye will ever again see Moulay Idriss and Fez and Marrakech as I saw them. "

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Wharton had a month to discover Morocco with General and Mme. Lyautey. During our journey in 2022  we will spend time in places that have caught the imaginations of authors from Samuel Pepys to William Buroughs in Tangier, tread the cobbled alleys of Fes described by Fatima Mernissi and Paul Bowles, and look towards that Sheltering Sky as we take tea the Sahara.

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We'll find  sun-dappled archways to sketch, cool tiled courtayrds to linger in ... come with pages to be filled, not just read ... as we discover the locations that thrilled Europe when Matisse created his sun-filled collection of canvases of the city William Burroughs would call 'the interzone'.

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This will be a tour for those who love a good reading list, yearn to sometimes linger a little longer and sketch on the back of that napkin, and hanker for a road less travelled. 

 

Much more to come, this is just to whet your appetite  ... do let me know if this interests you.

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